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October

A woman was sleeping, her auburn hair sprawled across the pillow, her chest rising and falling evenly. The stars were shining brightly outside the window- all was calm. Then, very quickly and without reason, the woman's breathing hitched. Her body moved up and down sporadically as a sinister feeling encompassed the room, like the sound of a chair rocking without a body in it. Frost shot up the windows at a supernatural rate. Things were rapidly changing. The woman's breathing became more and more aggravated until...

Everything stopped. It was not a good silence that then fell over the room, no, it was the kind of quiet that made people go mad. A terrifying sensation that somebody was watching came to the woman through closed eyelids. She shuddered.

And then an inhuman voice began to creep through the floorboards and the cracks underneath the doors, growing longer with every syllable it whispered,

"I- see- you."

Then, with a horrible screeching sound, the walls of the room began to move forward. They were closing in and no matter how hard she tried, the woman could not struggle free. Closer and closer they came, there was no air left for her to breathe and just as each side began to crush her bedframe there came the sound of a baby crying.

"Harry!"

Lily shot up from the couch which she had been so fitfully sleeping upon to a knock on the door. She immediately recognized it as Sirius' knock, she knew it was him, because the sound was just as short and manic as his thoughts were. James cut his eyes across to the entry way over his copy of 'The Daily Prophet.' The movement was severe and with her heart racing, still groggy from the nightmare, Lily couldn't quite figure why.

Because they had always met with with their Secretkeeper on Wednesday evenings. Of course these days, their meetings were full of prolonged pauses and a purposeful vagueness- for the sound of people trying very hard to ignore a war, rather, a war directed at them, could be quite crippling at times- but all the same, those conversations had become a normal part of their abnormal lives.

In a way, the Potter's dreaded Wednesday evenings, for a restrained hostility would always ensue because Lily wanted to take Harry and run far away, perhaps to a different country, where nobody knew their names. And James wanted to shake Lily by the shoulders and tell her that they could not run- that Voldemort would not be so easily fooled- that to survive they had to wait, and there was no safer place to wait than under Sirius Black.

But he didn't. If he did, then he would sound angry and Lily would cry. Nowadays he struggled not to sound angry, for fear had created a harshness in his voice- and he hated it when she cried. So they disagreed on mute and each found the other's silence damning.

Lily rubbed her weary eyes.

"James," Her voice held an exhausted expectancy, the kind that came with any long marriage, or in their case, any strenuous marriage, "get the door, please."

James did not move and looking at him, something suddenly struck a foolish feeling Lily- that it was only Tuesday. At any other time, she would have felt it almost laughable, how quickly her blood ran cold at the small realization, but they both knew Sirius would not break such a crucial routine unless mandatory. He loved them too much to compromise.

Their stunned attention to each other was suddenly drawn away by a sick pounding on the wood, it gyrated so violently that the handle rattled, one knock away from tearing the door from its very hinge.

James sprung from his armchair, looking stoic as ever, but it did not escape his wife's notice how tightly he gripped his wand hidden in his pocket. She shifted too. It was Sirius at the door, one of James' oldest friends, the Godfather of their child, and yet they were frightened. Not of him of course, but of what he had to say, and so then of him by default.

It seemed that as soon as James touched the handle, the door was swinging open with a gust of cool October wind and the shadow of their Secretkeeper was stepping through it. This time, as his features became illuminated in the warm light of their home, James didn't recognize him. He was gaunt and scared- so scared, wearing a look on his face that James had seen but once, when he had run away from home.

His message was quick,

"They know it's me."

Sirius' words hung over them like a thick fog and Lily was automatically taken back to the nightmare in which she struggled to breathe. A cry of utter despair got caught in her throat and instead she sat there floundering at him. James was quiet too, perhaps stricken. They both knew what his revelation meant.

The air in the room was suffocatingly stagnant, and Sirius' eyes swept across it with something like madness. He abruptly took James by the shoulders and threw him against the wall. His emotions becoming just as unruly as they were apparent.

"Did you hear what I said, man?" He cried. "They know! They know!"

Yes, he had heard. He wanted to ask how, to know when, to learn why but he was just too numb, so instead he wrapped his hand around the back of his best friend's neck and drew his forehead to his own. James didn't mind much to cry- Sirius did, and yet, there were tears rolling from his blue eyes.

In all likelihood, those monsters would track him down and when they found him there would be no mercy. There was a strong possibility that they would never meet again, and although the three of them were very aware of the risk Sirius volunteered himself to, it had seemed, at the time that the Fidelius Charm was placed, that they could live happily ever after.

Of course, by now they had learned that life was a funny little story, and there wasn't always something happy to come along and end it but that it would always come to an end.

The two men continued to cry together as if they were children and when they thought they could cry no more, James pulled his wife into their embrace and the three shook as one. It wasn't fair that Sirius would be probably be killed and they might just go on living. He wasn't the one that had a boy born at the end of July.

"Peter's coming tomorrow morning. He'll be your Secretkeeper from now on." Sirius explained, pulling away and not seeming at all embarrassed for his tears. There was a subtle urgency in his words. "I just want you both to know that I would do it all again if only to give you and Harry one more day. You'll see November," he smiled in that winning way, although it was a shade duller, "and then December, and then all the months until you go gray- I've got a good feeling about you three. You're going to change things."

"But what about you?" Lily whispered. "What are you going to do?"

"Well, I'm certainly not going to give up, am I? I'm good at running away, you know…"

Despite himself, James laughed- Sirius always made James laugh and he wasn't ready to face a world without him. It was strange that at the beginning, he thought war could only rob a person of life when really, life, was least important thing it could take away.

James wanted to keep him there for as long as possible, to stretch out to the fullest the very limited amount of time they had left, but Sirius kept checking his watch and was becoming visibly agitated. He could have felt like he was already operating on borrowed time- the Potter's knew quite a bit about that.

"You know what you have to do to me, mate."

James nodded because he did know- the spell was simple enough, but simple did not always mean easy. The solemn feeling a child gets every Sunday evening settled upon them as they stepped out into that clear October night.

Now it felt awkward, when nothing had ever been awkward between them before, so James slapped Sirius on the shoulder in a boyish way as he used to do at school. It seemed the appropriate thing to do, or, at least, it seemed the thing to keep him from bursting into tears again. Now, James did not want to cry, because tears could sometimes be taken as defeat and they were not defeated.

"I'll see you around, Padfoot."

"Until next time, Prongs."

And in the moment they both believed that because there was always hope, especially when it came to Sirius Black, and miracles were not as elusive as people made them out to be.

"Obliviate"

A/N: Hope you enjoyed! This is my explanation to what occurred right before the Potter's were killed as Peter was their Secretkeeper. I figured it would be a pretty emotional exchange between James and Sirius. Tell me what you think!